The stairs, a tooth, and we missed 7 months

I was waiting to post about the stairs because I wanted to get it on video, but we kept forgetting our video camera so you'll just have to believe me. My mom and Weston can vouch for Ellie too. Well, anyway on January 2nd we went to my parents' house to watch the Utah game on their new TV. Ellie of course couldn't sit still and was crawling all over their basement. She headed down the hallway and right up the stairs. I'm not kidding. I had to scrape my jaw off the floor. She has never been around our stairs because they are leading to the unfinished basement and we don't normally go down there. My parents have a split level home and while I followed her to make sure she didn't fall she trekked the 8-10 stairs to the front door on her own! I wish I had my camera there because we tried to make her do it again and she wasn't interested.

That same day, Ellie's first tooth "erupted". We were so shocked, but it made sense after how fussy she had been. It has come out quite a bit more since then.
You can't really see it, but it's on her left (your right)

Well, all of these pictures except the last one were taken after Ellie turned 7 months old, but we were so busy in December that we didn't get many random pictures of her. Our last progress post for Ellie was the middle of December (about two weeks late, but her 6 month post).

Since then, Ellie has perfected her wave. She can wave on her own to people she knows and she knows when I say "hi" she is supposed to wave. We put her in the cart at Walmart one night and as we pushed her down the aisle, she waved at everyone like she was in a parade.
She has been playing Peek-a-boo in her play pen. She crouches down and when I say "Where's Ellie?" she pops up and I say "Peek-a-boo". This is followed by lots of giggling.
She loves to walk when you hold her hands.
She can use her pincer grasp to feed herself pieces of bread, cereal puffs, and the occasional marshmallow.
She puts herself into a sit when she is crawling and she is getting very fast. She is also still pulling herself up on everything and trying to walk along. She's getting daring and we find ourselves wincing quite a bit.

Ellie's first zwieback toast strip

We didn't teach her this naughty hand signal